Need Help Building A Stable System For Maya/Max And After Effects@2560

My System consists of a 512Mb GTS250,8Gb System Ram and an i7 3930k and DX79TO motherboard.

I want to know if this would be enough to use softwares like Maya,Max,Aftereffects and other similar video editing softwares on a 2560x1440 monitor like the HP U2713H and U2713HM or the Hp ZR2740w v2(still deciding which one to get.(Open to PLS screens too please give me your suggestion)

Is anyone using current generation Geforce cards like the GTX 660Ti with these softwares?How does it perform.

How do the AMD ATI cards fare with these softwares.Here the HD7870Xt fits in.How is the performance with the softwares I have listed.

well after effects does not have GPU Acceleration (ie mercury playback support ) for ATI cards yet so that's not a good idea if you are planning doing a fair amount of video editing . once you encoding it , the CPU takes over so it doesn't matter at that point. I guess it depends on if you are going to use the build in effects or scrub 4k footage (ie RED) , etc .

for maya and 3ds max once again it depends on what your doing . if yor just playing around than it doesn't really matter. if you want to do some work running 2560 Rez than a pro card like FireGl or Quadro would be a better choice .

For monitors I did hear good things about he HP Dream but Iv haven't used one . I more of a Dell Ultrasharp fan .

ps . I'm on my phone but of you check my sig I have a workstation guide that might help.

Bringing it to after effects after rendering and using after effects to composite the image sequences.(correct me if I am wrong, student here.)

Similarly would use After effects for final rendering of image sequences from PFtrack, Mocha and other such softwares.

Thanks for the suggestion, for the monitors I was considering the Hp ZR2740w v2 or the the Dell U2713H OR HM.Not sure of the Samsung PLS screens.For the graphics card, the quadro that you have in your signature, the FX4800 is out of my budget.Please suggest something.

Bringing it to after effects after rendering and using after effects to composite the image sequences.(correct me if I am wrong, student here.)

Similarly would use After effects for final rendering of image sequences from PFtrack, Mocha and other such softwares.

That will not really matter what video card you use. compiling frames eats resources so a good amount of ram would be a good idea.

What you need to be looking at is what you will be using more. 3ds Max like Nvidia cards and in fact for some odd reason the newer versions like 2012 (and above) run better with a geforce card. granted you lose true stability and some viewport features but it is a lot cheaper. Maya runs better with FireGl cards (though i dont like them) and Quadros. The gaming ones suffer that the top consumer card will be about as fast as a entry level pro card.

If your not going to be playing games, than I think a Pro card will be a better fit in the long run and you can get them cheap on ebay. The Fx 4800 I got for $200. I've found recently a FX 3800 for $100.

For the monitor I think get only real reason to get those other than 2560 rez is for color support/ accuracy. You will still have to calibrate it just like any other monitor but it will diplay a larger range.

Edit: I really haven't found much information about anyone running above 1080 (people who do just don't benchmark i guess). I do not know what the lowest card you would want to be using. My guess is any entry level card will not work and be sluggish. I wish I could be more helpful but I don't have any way to test.

. well that 660 might be your best option . 3ds max and after effects will benfit from it and youll just have to suffer in maya without a pro card . also you have no 10bit support unless its a pro card so your limited to 16.7'million colors (aka 8bit)

The only thing about the 660 is the 192 bit memory interface that affects it in a bad way at 2560x1440 res.That is the only reason for my leaning more towards the HD7870 with its 256 bit memory interface.

Will look out for used Quadro cards.If I cant find any i will go with the cheaper of the two dell monitors.The U2713HM one.It its the 8bit one.

your really comparing apples to oranges with ATI vs Nvidia. Even more so with memory interface. I don't think I could explain it very well so some googling or asking in the video card thread might get you some good answers.

edit: kinda like if my car has a bigger gas tank, it doesnt mean its a better car. The reason why I say Nvidia (other than I like them) is because After-effect will benfit for CUDA and 3ds Max will also.

I did some looking other than still not knowing how 2560 will run the 7850 might be a better choice. I found a few random forum posts showing specview with the 7850 being better. But since it wasn't controlled It also could be any other factors like CPU, RAM, Drivers.

either way a consumer card isn;t my first choice to recomend but you don't have a choice. Best of luck, report back with which ever you get while running 2560 rez!

it's part of the chipset (X79) for the 2011 socket and Z77 for the 1155. They are all backwards complatible so a 1.1 and 2.0 work on 3.0 and 3.0 work on 2.0. It should matter little with a single card I dont think you can max out PCIE 2.0 bandwith yet. If you have like a Raid card and 2-3 video cards than yeah the extra bandwith aka Lanes will be helpful.

edit: I guess I should say the chipset allows 3.0 to work but the card has to support it. otherwise it will run at its own speed like 2.0, etc.